The UK has adopted policy requiring nutritional information to be displayed on the packaging of ready-made meals, giving consumers more data and context surrounding the foods that they eat. These kinds of ideas are now spreading to the US, as lawmakers consider making it required that large restaurant chains include similar information at point-of-purchase displays.

We see a corollary with feedback-loop models of how our devices are becoming increasingly able to change behavior for the better by extracting more data from our lives – in general, people are finding that information that has always existed in the world provides short-term decision-making value when brought to the forefront of our attention, but also contributes to a stronger long-term sense of how to live better lives.

These ideas are currently being applied to the food retail space, but we expect to see the trend develop into manifestations of easily-consumable and at-a-glance bits of information for other products as well, detailing the production process and other background information.